The jinx was over, the dream attained. His friends and family cheered. His wife congratulated him on Facebook.

"You broke the barrier!" she wrote.

Michael's great accomplishment? He'd made it to the age of 61.

In the known history of my father's side of the family — the Midwestern German-Irish, hard-drinking, hardworking, quick-tempered, devoutly Catholic Schmich side — no man has lived that long.

My father died at 60. His father and his brother died even younger, and the evidence on their forefathers is murky.

Their hearts got them, or their lungs, abetted by bad habits and ornery dispositions. They left life before their kids were fully established as adults, before their grandkids could know them, before, on the bright side, they suffered the full assault of getting old.

Oh, the women in the family, they went on forever, as reliable as sky, as enduring as rock. My father's sister was still toasting life with a nightly glass of wine, or two, well into her 90s.

The jinx was only on the men, and my brothers, since their 20s, have been trailed by their ghosts.

For years after my father died, the short lives of Schmich men was a family joke. Those men! No stamina! We teased my brother Bill, the oldest of the five boys, that it was his job to show what an old man of our clan would look like.

We teased without worrying very much. Times had changed. We had easier, healthier lives than our father and grandfather. Bill was an even-tempered man with no significant vices. Sixty was the new 40.

With Bill gone, the jokes ceased to be so funny, especially for Michael, who was next in the fraternal line. We kept joking anyway, but a faint shadow of possibility was always lurking.

We joked because what was the option? That's one thing siblings are for, to help each other lighten the mood and load, to assure each other that everything will be just fine, to help each other believe that you'll all get old together, witnesses to the beauties and indignities that entails.

It was in that sibling spirit that I called Michael on his birthday to say: Hey, old man, you made it across the line.

I was kidding, but not entirely. I asked him if he'd taken the jinx seriously.

"Sure," he said. "Sure."

He hadn't always, at least not too seriously. He'd assumed Bill would make it to 60, blazing the trail to old age for the younger brothers.

"And then he didn't," Michael said. "You sit back and think, are we designed this way? Am I going to hit the genetic threshold and it's going to be: Time's up! That's the whole mortality thing. You never see it coming and then there it is, banging on your door."

But here he was, a record-breaking 61 years old, and the door was quiet.

A lot of us see a reflection of ourselves in our parents, not only in their lives but in their deaths. We wonder if we'll live as long or longer, and if we want to. Their allotted time can seem like a clue to our own portion.

I have a friend who has lived well past his father's age but until he got past it, he wasn't sure he would. He wondered and worried. The age loomed like a deadline. He still feels he didn't deserve to live so much longer, though he knows that "deserve" rarely has anything to do with dying.

As we get older, we see our mortality reflected in our siblings and our friends as well. When one of them dies early, it's only natural to wonder if our own clock has been secretly fast-forwarded.

"It always comes as a surprise," Michael said, with a philosophical air appropriate for a man of his advanced age.

Generations from now, men in the family are unlikely to know that in 2017, Michael made family history, but I'm putting it on the record here, a reminder to all of us not to take our years for granted. He doesn't.